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The phenomenal Brooklyn band Guerilla Toss graced the hometown crowd with a monthlong residency at local haunt Union Pool that found the band trying out new songs and compelling covers, and generally driving the locals wild. This band’s bread and butter has always been the live setting, but these shows put the band at a new level. Against the backdrop of sick visuals from Macrodose, Kassie Carlson whipped the room into a frenzy, culminating in a room wide mosh pit during set-closing “Polly’s Crystal.” Whipping from one song straight into the next for almost the entire hour, the band served up sixteen songs that included an ESG cover and the new numbers “Come Up With Me” and “Green Apple.” In case you were worried, I think we can expect their next release to meet or exceed the outstanding GT Ultra.

This recording combines engineer Doug’s awesome house mix plus my Schoeps MK5 mics from the center of the balcony. The sound is excellent. Enjoy!

Ryley Walker arrived on The Bowery Ballroom stage as the opening act. For many bands, the opening 45 minutes means an opportunity to deliver a tight-but-denuded set that gives the untutored fan a reason to seek more. Well, Ryley and this night’s crack band — longtime compatriot Ryan Jewell, fellow guitarist Bill MacKay, and Calexico (the headliner) bassist Scott Colberg — did the latter but not the former. Which is to say, their version of a “short” set consisted of four songs, but one of them was 18 minutes long. And instead of “the hits,” as it were, those four were, save one, all tracks from his forthcoming album, Deafman Glance, which promises to extend Walker’s renown as a musician’s musician, who follows his instincts where they take him and isn’t afraid to challenge the listener.

If for years the understanding among Walker and his fans is that there’s about as little relationship between the reasonably straightforward sound of his records and his expansive, jazz-influenced live shows as there is between the seriousness of Walker’s music and the lightheartedness of his stage banter, the Deafman Glance material seems poised to narrow that gap. The proggy, dense, album sound carries over well into Walker’s chosen live milieu, making (for example) the “Telluride Speed” that closed this set a thrill but, unlike the eighteen-minute “Halfwit In Me” that opened it, not a totally radical departure from the album version.

Ryley’s stated goal was for Deafman Glance to be his anti-folk record, and indeed, this felt like the least folk-driven Ryley Walker show I’ve seen. With his vocals turned relatively low in the mix, and a song selection that was relatively short on opportunities for vocal pyrotechnics, Walker seemed intent on letting his electric guitar guide his sound (listen to that “Halfwit in Me” – it did). Walker’s full-band shows have always de-prioritized vocals to some degree in favor of extended jamming, but if I hadn’t seen Walker before and someone told me this was a guy who also does a mean cover of Van Morrison, I’m not sure I’d have believed them. That’s one of the joys of seeing this artist — by the time I see him again (expect a headlining tour in the U.S. in the fall), he’ll almost surely have evolved yet again.

I recorded this set with a beautiful stereo soundboard feed and Schoeps MK5 cardiod microphones. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Hiss Golden Messenger’s second night at The Bowery Ballroom not only picked up where the first two-hour show left off, but gathered steam. If the first night–in front of a slew of friends and local musicians–felt like a more intimate, freewheeling affair, this show situated the current version of the band as the confident rock n’ roll outfit they are, playing about fifty percent different material from the first show, improving on several of the repeats, and delivering crowd-pleasing covers that are red meat to a weekend crowd. After opening with the contemplative “When the Wall Comes Down” from Hallelujah Anyhow, the tempo picked up and stayed hot through the first hour. I was moved by this version of “Blue Country Mystic,” which hewed closer in tempo and style to the Poor Moon original than some of the recent versions I’ve seen, and likewise, the “Red Rose Nantahala” we saw both tonight and the night before felt closer to the version from Haw than some of the recent versions we’ve heard. The new songs haven’t given the band as many chances at new arrangements, but it’s safe to say that “Like A Mirror Loves A Hammer,” shows great potential as a mid-set jam song.

After a heartfelt mid-set version of “Caledonia, My Love” — introduced by Phil Cook as his favorite HGM song — it was back to the rock, with the band letting loose with a fine cover of “I Won’t Back Down” followed by “Lost Out In the Darkness” and the party jam “I’m A Raven (Shake Children).” This is a band that knows their crowd, and the upbeat rockers matched the mood in the room, as the weekend warriors and the repeat customers from last night both had come ready to celebrate the weekend and the band’s success. Instead of last night’s heartfelt retelling of the band’s origin story, we got some hilarious riffs about the band’s long night out last night, including an encounter with some pretzel chips. But if they were physically running on fumes, HGM didn’t show it. If anything, I found most versions of what they played even sharper and more emphatic than the previous show. In lieu of an encore break, the band accepted some pretzel chips from a fan and passed them around the crowd, ending the night with Pops Staples’ “Friendship” followed by “Drum.” This wasn’t quite the end of HGM year — they headed to Philly the following night, and D.C. after that — but it felt valedictory nonetheless, an exclamation point on a year well spent.

I recorded this set in the same manner as the previous night, with a soundboard feed from the band’s engineer Tim and Schoeps MK22 microphones. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Children are essential to the origin story of Hiss Golden Messenger, and they’ve been a recurring theme in Mike “M.C.” Taylor’s songs since the beginning. Taylor introduced “Drum” on this night by telling the story in full, of a loser (his words) washed up from music, left out of life, sitting in a cabin next to a newborn, wondering about the future. Contemplating his life as he sat next to his newborn son Elijah, Taylor started to make music again. For him that child wasn’t just a literal birth; it was his personal rebirth, too. It was there that he wrote my favorite of all his songs, “Call Him Daylight,” which tackles the ambiguity of forces greater than us (some would view that as “God,” though I don’t think you have to). To that entity he says at one point, “Some call you destroyer, some Daylight.” It’s a fundamental paradox of many world religions — you’re asked to revere god as your creator, but also your ultimate destroyer. Which kept me thinking about children, and this band’s particular choices in 2017.

The righteous anger of musicians (not to mention the rest of us) toward the current regime is hardly news at this point, and it’s been reflected in many, many albums this year. If you follow the man on Twitter, you might expect the same from Taylor. But the latest Hiss Golden Messenger album does perhaps the braver thing, certainly the rarer thing. It’s announced by the title, Hallelujah Anyhow. A child who wakes up alive for the first time tomorrow here in America won’t know the name of anyone in the current administration, won’t harbor rage toward the rich or the indecent or the greedy, won’t know about hate, won’t worry about global warming, won’t fear misogyny or racism, won’t know war. In a child’s eyes the world is all beauty. In a child’s eyes this world is all they’ve known.

Taylor and a stacked band of Triangle locals (Phil Cook, Skylar Gudasz, Darren Jesse, Ryan Gustafson, Mike Lewis, James Wallace, Michael Libramento) brought that ethos to the Bowery Ballroom for this first of two nights, giving us two hours of inclusive, upbeat Hallelujah songs as well as a well-chosen selection of favorites. The past two years have seen this band release not less than three complete albums — the band hit another high point with 2016’s Heart Like A Levee and companion album Vestapol — which has stacked the catalog with new material. If you missed the outstanding Music Hall of Williamsburg show the band did in 2016 (which I unfortunately did) this could well have been your first time hearing many of these songs live. It’s striking how cohesive the Merge-era, bigger-room-oriented material is with itself, but there’s also that constant thread that reaches all the way back to Bad Debt. Compare the two songs that Taylor played as a duo with Cook — “Drum” (a very old one) and “Caledonia, My Love” (a new one) — and it’s clear that Taylor’s heart remains where it has been, in a purgatory between light and darkness. Each of those songs may have been an outlier on their respective albums, but side by side, they make sense.

Still, this was a positive night, a two-hour “evening with,” and there was plenty of party music to celebrate with, including the band’s semi-regular cover of Sam Cooke’s “Having A Party” and the main set closers “Domino” followed by the already-classic “Southern Grammar.” Having seen these songs performed many times now, by a variety of personnel, I’ve come to appreciate the variations in Taylor’s performances of his work. Songs, too, are a kind of offspring, an evolving gift to a wider world, and Taylor has continued to help these songs grow into new and different entities than what they were. Taylor’s restless tinkering with this music seems almost calculated to keep you in that state, able to see his music as brand-new even if you’ve seen him a dozen or more times before. If you’re lucky you’ll listen long enough that you find yourself, however briefly, like that open-hearted child again, able to say that simple word, hallelujah. You stand there inside the Bowery Ballroom, and it’s the holiday season, it’s New York City, and you’re alive. So hallelujah, anyhow.

I recorded this set with Schoeps MK22 open cardiod microphones mounted at the soundboard, with a feed of the PA mix from the band’s dapper sound engineer Tim. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Two years on from their tour de force performance at Music Hall of Williamsburg and the release of their last album, Transfixiation, A Place to Bury Strangers found themselves at the faux-DIY venue Villain doing what they’ve done best in years past, while looking also to the future. If the controlled chaos of set opener “We’ve Come So Far” took on a different meaning in 2017, it also felt like it took on a greater one. APTBS vets know what to expect from their shows at this point — a blanket of noise anchored by Oliver Ackermann’s guitars (his expertise in pedals comes in handy), almost always at maximum intensity, a delightfully disorienting light show — and their Brooklyn shows reflect the communal vibe among those people.

As it has been a couple years since their last record (though they did just release a new song), I was unfamiliar with several of the (what I think were new) songs played, but the distinction for most of us was minimal. An APTBS show is less about this or that song than the overall experience, the subtle shifts in texture and tempo, the often-dark lyrics that you at-times strain to hear, the relentlessness of Ackermann (in particular) onstage, as he smashes the hell out of his guitar long before the end of the set. Where the last APTBS show found the band playing on the Music Hall floor, this time the band took advantage of Villain’s layout and performed a more electronic-driven closing sequence of four songs from the balcony. When the beats finally stopped, you couldn’t help but feel a little bit lighter, a bit freer. At some point “cathartic” might start to feel like an overused term in these times, but in these first months, it’s still a very accurate one.

I recorded this set with a soundboard feed combined with Schoeps MK41V microphones from the audience. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Despite being from nearby Philly, Bardo Pond don’t make it to New York nearly as often as I would like. Or maybe my version of “often” is too frequent. Either way, the band continue to prove their vitality and consistency into their third decade. This show at Union Pool began with one of their more recent favorites of mine, “Kali Yuga Blues” from Peace on Venus, but spread across the spectrum of the band’s career, from the Lapsed classic “Straw Dog” to several brand-new songs that haven’t made their way onto official releases yet. Of the new ones, it was my first time hearing, “My Eyes Out,” a heavy, relatively fast-burning scorcher of a tune. It’s equally hard to deny the band’s new more exploratory number, “Moment to Moment,” which closed out this show for fourteen mind-bending minutes. If there was any regret about this show, it was that the show’s tight timetable meant that it couldn’t go on longer. Judging by the band’s appearances this year, they are feeling more artistically vital than ever, and ready to prove it. Hope to see them again soon.

I recorded this set with a soundboard feed from Union Pool engineer Robert (which fades in after about 50 seconds), together with Schoeps MK4V microphones. The only other flaw in the sound is the hiss of the smoke machine, but it’s less a true flaw than “atmospherics.” Overall, the sound is excellent. Enjoy!

Watching Steve Gunn and his latest band play this performance at The Bell House reminded me of the below Gunn performance with Alex Bleeker & the Freaks at the “Play Dead” show that we captured in 2015. Gunn’s music at the time — consisting of solo guitar records, his duo work in Gunn-Truscinski Duo, and his two Paradise of Bachelors LPs, Time Off and Way Out Weather — wasn’t necessarily the work of someone who revered the Dead. But as he and Bleeker’s band played “Wharf Rat” that night, it all clicked. Part of what continues to make the Grateful Dead so special is that there are multiple entry points to the band, a whole universe of styles and vibes contained within individual tours and individual shows and, even, individual songs. Gunn wasn’t a person who mimicked the band’s style(s), at all, but he had absorbed many of their lessons. And this show, more than most of his I have seen, proved it.

This show, the band’s final of the year after a long slog of touring and greatly increased exposure thanks to Gunn’s Matador Records debut, Eyes On the Lines, was my first time seeing most of Eyes On the Lines in the live setting, despite having seen Gunn several times this year. Maybe it was the hometown crowd, whose love is unconditional and the opposite of the “play the hits” mentality of the festival crowds, maybe it was the finely honed interplay among the musicians, maybe it was just them saying “fuck it” and doing things the way they wanted — whatever it was, Gunn and Co. came out and turned even some of the relatively concise material of Eyes On the Lines into life-affirming jams that both challenged and enlightened. What’s most gratifying about watching an artist that you’ve followed for a while keep doing this after achieving his greatest commercial popularity to date is to know how unafraid of it he is, how resolutely true to himself.

Gunn bookended the show with stripped-down songs, starting things off with a fourteen-minute solo acoustic “Old Strange” that was a classic mix of Gunn’s earnest lyrics and desert blues guitar, with the “Wildwood” encore with James Elkington on the electric and Steve on the acoustic. While hearing the new songs — especially a personal favorite, “Ancient Jules” — was a blast, what also stuck me was once again how the music cut through the heaviness of the political moment without flinching from it. Gunn’s impassioned intro to “Park Bench Smile” about inclusion and “fighting what the fuck’s happening” hit its mark, but the song, as rendered, spoke for itself. A noisy, messy, emphatic rendition of the song, it felt like so much of this moment, chaotic but, ultimately, resolved into something hopeful, defiant, and right. What a way to end a year.

I recorded this set with engineer David Hurtgen’s house mix combined with Schoeps MK41V hypercardiod microphones. David’s regular work with the venue shows here, as the sound is dialed in and excellent. Enjoy!

The first time I sawHerbcraft, I had no idea who they were, had barely gotten set up, and had no idea what to expect. Two years later, I can say that that show by the Portland, Maine band remains one of the true gems of my entire recording “career,” and one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve ever come across from a live band period, let alone an opener. The band’s fluid, almost entirely improvisational sets are a thing of cosmic beauty, taking you to that comfortable yet foreign place where your mind and music unite. This set at Trans-Pecos, opening for MV & EE, continued in that vein, as the band played an extended thirty minute improv that even they couldn’t give a name to. This afternoon set required neither fancy lights nor the cover of darkness to take us back to that place, to open our minds and our imaginations to a better world that is not quite our own. Dig in.

I recorded this set with Schoeps MK4V microphones in the audience and Naiant X-X omnidirectional microphones split onstage. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

YVETTE owned the stage on this night at Market Hotel, preparing the crowd for HEALTH with their enveloping, dark, and percussive sound that seems like it won’t let you go. Since 2013’s Process we’ve seen YVETTE grow and evolve as a band, as they’ve continued to gestate new material before rapt live audiences. Between our Hopscotch encounter with them in 2014 to a Trans-Pecos show in 2015, they’ve continued to develop new and exciting ways to get under our skin, including a couple of new songs on this night that we hadn’t heard before (one so new it lacks a title). Likewise, the Market made sense for this band and the one it followed, with the room’s layout literally narrowing the focus to the lone duo up front, backlit and relentless. Noah Kardos-Fein and drummer Dale Eisinger have always maintained a certain economy to their shows, foregoing most chatter in favor of weaving their set into a continuous flow. It feels like time for a new record, which they’ve continued to work on, especially as Process predates Eisinger’s time in the band. We can’t wait to hear it.

I recorded this set with the mounted AT 4051 cardiods an a flawless soundboard feed from house engineer Jason. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Our lovefest with all things Oneida and Oneida-related continued earlier this month when, on the heels of the final Oneida set at Secret Project Robot, we caught People of the North in the same venue. While POTN shares personnel with Oneida (regulars Kid Millions and Bobby Matador, plus Barry London for this set), the band’s vibe is distinct, with an even-more fluid and keyboard-driven approach. The band has a new album, The Caul, on its way from Thrill Jockey, but who knows whether this material is reflective of that, or just the bandmembers’ mind-state at showtime. Whatever the reason, this 45-minute improv was yet another reminder that with this group of musicians, you can always count on an interesting trip.

I recorded this set with a pair of Schoeps MK4V microphones at the stage lip. The sound quality is outstanding. Enjoy!

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